Software

The Ai software is a powerful media server that delivers fast, intuitive, easy control featuring market leading media playback quality, a fully customisable node-based system (Salvation Engine) suited to the requirements of your individual performance. Ai Media Servers facilitate the future of live entertainment, lighting and video and are designed for professional show designers, content producers and artists, enabling seamless delivery of multi-media video projects at any scale or venue.

Ai is a QuickTime capable application, which means that most files which play in QT “should” play within Ai. However, please note that Interframe codecs (such as h264, mpeg2,4 etc) and other CPU based codecs will significantly reduce playback performance. For this reason, we always recommend using the AiM codec as this will give the very best results for your show. Please note that our support engineers will always insist on the use of the AiM codec as this is the only codec we use internally for testing.

For Further information on the AiM codec please take a look at this detailed document – AiM Codec Analysis.

The smooth playback is down to our revolutionary AiM codec (a cross platform Quicktime codec) and the use of the latest GPU technology bred for the gaming industry, but now re-developed with the support of AMD and Nvidia exclusively for Ai. This allows for much better playback performance and can easily handle media of 4k resolution and above. To encode your media using the AiM codec, first download it from (http://www.avolites.com/ai/AIM_Codec.zip). To install the codec: OSX – To install the AiM codec on OSX copy ‘AiMCodec.component’ to /Library/Quicktime Windows – To install the AiM codec on Windows XP / 7 copy AiMWin32.qtx to C:Program FilesQuickTimeQTSystem (on 32bit systems) or C:Program Files(x86)QuickTimeQTSystem (on 64bit systems)
For Further information on the AiM codec please take a look at this detailed document - AiM Codec Analysis

It is usually recommend that media is created
with a width which is divisible by 16. The AiM codec is much happier that way.
It might work fine on many systems with a media width which is not divisible by
16 but it would not be recommended; because on some systems we have seen
problems when the media is created at a width which is not divisible by 16. I
would suggest adding a couple of pixels into the void areas between the screens
to pad the width out to a number which is divisible by 16, or perhaps remove a
few pixels from the void areas, whichever has least impact. You’re also welcome
to ignore this advice if you’re able to test every system involved in the
playback systems and content creation thoroughly – its a GPU / OS dependent
issue.

To encode your mediawith the AiM codec, you need to use video software, such as Final Cut Pro,Premier, After Effects, etc. Within your software, load your movie(s), and thenchoose to export/render using the AiM codec. There are three choices when using this codec, Transparency, Optimise For and Threads.

Transparency allows you to choose wether to discard or preserve the Alpha channel in your clips.

Optimise For has 3 choices - Quality which gives you a full 24bit render, Performance which is a 16bit render that is equivalent to the DXV codec, and Superstream which is a 24 bit variation with more frame information and results in slightly larger files but also gives the best playback performance.

The threads option allows you to determine how many processor threads are used when encoding - an incorrect setting can result in renders not being completed, and therefore we would recommend choosing the max option which will automatically determine how many threads you have available to use.

Ai makes use of FreeFrameGL effects – an open source effects standard freely available from many sources across the internet. They can be added to Ai by installing them to DistribModulesEffectsFreeFrameGL.

This generally happens when Ai is run on a system which does not meet the required specification for the graphics card – often this will be due to an Intel graphics chip with shared memory. unfortunately these are not supported in Ai as they lack some of the higher functions required of the GPU that Ai makes use of. Please refer to the minimum required specs for further information.

Live video can be dropped into the roller que to select as a source by selecting one of the patches named ‘LiveVideo’ in DistribPatches. You can select additional patches from the same patches folder for SDI inputs and for Active Silicon Phoenix cards which are named accordingly.

OS is 64 bit, software is 32 bit at the moment, there are no immediate plans to convert to 64 bit, the software is fast enough as it is. We may decide to do this conversion in the future if it seems necessary.

The system can play back DXV movies, but we have our own new codec
(called AiM) which is similar in some respects to DXV but it has some
significant quality improvements. Colour reproduction is much better than DXV
which suffers with banding in smooth gradients due to the format using 16 bit
RGB colour where our codec uses 24 bit RGB. The trade off is that files are 30%
bigger than DXV, although there are 2 options in the quicktime settings one for
‘optimise for performance’ which produces similar results to DXV with some
minor colour improvements but with matching file sizes and a 2nd option to
optimise for quality which gives the 24 bit RGB colour and 30% larger file
sizes.

The default setting present in Bootcamp for scaling may need to be changed. With Ai closed right click on the Ai shortcut on the desktop, select ‘properties’ and then the ‘compatibility’ tab. If ‘disable display scaling on high DPI settings’ is checked then uncheck it. Then restart the system.

Hardware

Yes, Ai can be controlled using industry standard MIDI, DMX or ArtNet
controllers or from our own range of dedicated control surfaces. We recommend
using our Titan range of consoles for excellent integration and functionality
with the Ai software.

Occasionally, the screen outputs can come up in the wrong order when
connected to the system. This can easily be rectified by first going into the
Windows Display Settings and reordering your screens in the correct order, e.g.
1, 2, 3, 4, etc. It is then a good idea to go into your graphics card’s display
settings and also changing the order here as well. In most cases this will
rectify the issue. It is important to ensure you have the screens connected in
the right order from the graphics card. In the R-range of media servers, the
top DisplayPort connector is Output 1.

It is worth noting that video playback software is very demanding of
the graphics card. As a good reference point for the capabilities of your
hardware you may find PassMask
Software's video card benchmark pages for high end GPU's useful. A
PassMark G3D mark of 5000 or more could be considered a general minimum
performance requirement for Ai, but in practice the actual requirements will
vary a lot depending on how you use Ai.

We have used the quadro series in the past and they are very good cards. Performance is not a lot better than standard Nvidia Gaming cards though in our application. What they do excel at though is long term reliability. These cards will last much longer than the gaming cards which can burn out after a year or two of continuous usage.

Capabilities

As of version 7, Ai has the ability to create complex screen layouts using our model merge feature and vary how the texture is applied to them using our unique canvas editor . For previous versions of Ai, it is best to use an external modelling application.

Currently Ai can play back stereo audio in WAV format. Also, if your video clips contain audio, we recommend re-encoding them with the AiM codec. The best settings are 16-bit stereo at 44.1kHz uncompressed. If encoding in Quicktime it is necessary to untick the ‘Big Endian’ option. Files rendered with different rates may not perform as expected. We are looking into the permissibility of incorporating other audio formats.

For the best results, we recommend using our own AiM codec with audio embedded. Alternatively, WAV files can be added to the timeline along with videos and then the result exported as a single timeline cue.